Worse than Watergate?
The Mother of All Constitutional Crises
By Judith Coburn
TomDispatch.com

Tuesday 22 November 2005

On
July 31, 1973, while the Vietnam war was still
being fought, Representative Robert Drinan, a Massachusetts Democrat,
introduced the first impeachment resolution against President Richard Nixon.
One of the grounds for indictment Drinan proposed was the secret bombing of Cambodia, ordered by the President. To Drinan,
this was a crime at least as great as the domestic scandals which had already
come to be known as "Watergate." The fourteen months of massive B-52
"carpet bombings," which killed tens of thousands of Cambodian
villagers and an unknown number of Vietnamese communist soldiers in border
sanctuaries, were run outside the military's chain of command. They were also
kept completely secret from Congress and the public (until exposed by New York
Times reporter William Beecher). In recently released transcripts of telephone
conversations between Nixon and his closest aides, the President ordered
"a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia [using] anything that flies on anything that moves." (The
transcript then records an unintelligible comment that "sounded like
[General Alexander] Haig laughing.")

The
secret bombing of Cambodia involved the same abuse of power
and political manipulation of government agencies as Watergate, but only a few
Congressional representatives like John Conyers, Elizabeth Holtzman, and Edward
Mezvinsky supported Drinan's Cambodia
article, which was soundly defeated by the House impeachment committee 26-12.

There
are many myths about Watergate - among them that Woodward and Bernstein rode
into Dodge and rescued the republic all by themselves, that the impeachment of
Richard Nixon saved American constitutional democracy from destruction, and
that the grounds on which Nixon was impeached were a fair reflection of what he
and "all the President's men" had actually done. In American mythology,
"the system worked."

To
most Americans, the slaughter of millions of Cambodians, Vietnamese, and Lao,
as well as the destruction of their countries, seem unrelated to
"Watergate." Henry Kissinger, one of the architects of the secret
bombing of Cambodia, who had ordered his own
dissenting staffers and several journalists illegally wiretapped to stop leaks,
escaped indictment and would soon be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Few
now remember that it was Indochina, not the burglary of Democratic
National Committee headquarters at the Watergate Complex that really set
Watergate, the scandal, in motion and led to a pattern of Presidential conduct
which seems eerily familiar today. In his 1974 book, Time of Illusion, Jonathan
Schell wrote of "the distortions in the conduct of the presidency which
deformed national politics in the Vietnam years - the isolation from reality, the rage against political
opposition, the hunger for unconstitutional power, the conspiratorial
mindedness, the bent for repressive action." He concluded that three
presidents "consistently sacrificed the welfare of the nation at home to
what they saw as the demands of foreign affairs."

To
recast an infamous Vietnam slogan: They had to destroy
American democracy at home in order to save the world for democracy.

Saving the System in the Name of National Security

It
would seem little has changed. Rather than "saving the system,"
Watergate only slowed for a brief period the increasing concentration of power
in the White House and the Pentagon, not to speak of its abuse after Ronald
Reagan came to power in the name of national security. The now nearly forgotten
Iran-Contra scandal during Reagan's reign revealed in a stark way the illegal
lengths to which that administration's anti-communist ideologues were willing
to go to defy Congress. Using every stealth method at their command, top Reagan
officials defied and effectively nullified a Congressional ban on aid to the
"Contras," right-wing Nicaraguans who were determined to overthrow the
leftist Sandinistas then in power in their country. White House, CIA, State
Department, and Pentagon officials schemed to pass along to the Contras profits
from the illegal sale of high-tech arms to the fundamentalist Muslim regime of
Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran. (Iran was in a desperate war with Saddam Hussein's Iraq, then officially supported by the
Reagan Administration.)

Now,
once again, ideologues - this time formerly anti-communist neoconservatives -
have taken America into another foreign war, whose
pretext was as flimsy as the fabricated North Vietnamese attack on American
destroyers in the TonkinGulf that led to Lyndon Johnson's decision to send combat
troops to Vietnam. This latest war is being run by
an administration at least as isolated, enraged, obsessed with secrecy, and
abusive of power as Richard Nixon's. Americans are as obsessed by the
relatively minuscule number of American casualties in Iraq as they were by the 58,000
Americans who died in Vietnam and just as blind to the suffering
of Iraqis as they were to the millions of Indochinese who died.

Just
as during Watergate and Iran-Contragate, the machinations of Beltway leakers -
in this case in the Plame affair - carry more weight politically than
life-and-death issues like the legalization of torture, the creation of secret,
offshore CIA "black" prisons, the administration's campaign to
suspend the constitutional rights of defendants and the protections of the
Geneva Conventions, not to speak of the administration's drive to create a
presidency of unfettered power. Revelations of war crimes by American GIs and
CIA operatives have been quickly dismissed by picking a few low-ranking
scapegoats like Lyndie English while higher ups go unpunished, just as the
chain of responsibility for the My Lai massacres in Vietnam stopped with Lt. William Calley.
Secret agent Valerie Plame in her Jackie O shades, posing for Vanity Fair with
her whistleblowing husband Joe Wilson, becomes the celebrity du jour standing
in for Daniel Ellsberg, leaker of the Pentagon Papers, the secret history of
the Vietnam war, who was photographed by the radically chic Richard Avedon.

The Genuine Articles

But
are things simply the same as in the 1970s (and again the Reagan era) or is our
present situation actually "worse than Watergate," as former Nixon
White House counsel John Dean, who turned on the President and his comrades to
save himself, argued in his prescient 2004 book of that title?

The
articles of impeachment Congress eventually framed to indict Richard Nixon make
interesting reading these days. The first article had at its heart the
Watergate break-in and the elaborate cover-up that followed, including
"making false or misleading statements to lawfully authorized
investigative officers and employees of the United States,"
"endeavoring to misuse the Central Intelligence Agency, an agency of the
United States," and "making or causing to be made false or misleading
public statements for the purpose of deceiving the people of the United States
into believing that a through and complete investigation had been conducted
with respect to allegations of misconduct on the part of personnel of the
executive branch of the United States..."

Article
2 was a catch-all indictment of all the violations of Americans' rights ordered
by the White House, including the political use of the IRS, CIA, Secret
Service, Justice Department, and FBI as well as wiretapping, surveillance, and
burglaries against those on President Nixon's notorious "enemies
list." In all such acts, "national security" was the
justification given.

The
facts may be different, but do the charges themselves sound familiar?

Article
3 concerned the White House's refusal to honor Congressional subpoenas for the
infamous tapes secretly recorded by the President and various papers relevant
to the Watergate investigation. "In refusing to produce these papers and
things Richard M. Nixon, substituting his judgment as to what materials were
necessary for the inquiry, interposed the powers of the Presidency against
the...House of Representatives."

No
one would expect history simply to repeat itself, especially since memories of
Watergate (and myths about it) have affected presidential actions ever since.
Ronald Reagan and his handlers, faced with Iran/Contragate, certainly
remembered how Nixon's cover-up came to seem more egregious than the actions it
sought to conceal. Reagan immediately fired Oliver North, the National Security
Council staffer who masterminded the scheme, and sent his National Security
Adviser Admiral John M. Poindexter packing (if only for a trip back to the
Navy). He then appointed the Tower Commission and a special prosecutor to
investigate, appearing to cooperate with Congressional investigations even
while undermining them. In his comprehensive and fascinating book, The Wars of
Watergate, historian Stanley I. Kutler points out how much cleverer the Reaganites
were than Nixon's men in leaving no documents or tapes to be seized.

George
W. Bush and his associates must have remarkably short memories. While he has
been careful to mouth words of cooperation in the Plamegate case, he has
depended on the Republican control of Congress to stonewall on just about every
egregious misdeed that has seen the light of day, blocking public hearings into
Abu Ghraib, the treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo, the CIA secret prison
system, faux intelligence on Iraq, and Plamegate itself.

That
felicitous Watergate phrase "high crimes and misdemeanors" and the
word "impeachment" are now heard in circles on the left, with the
legal grounds for impeachment being explored by lawyers like Elizabeth de la
Vega in the Nation magazine and at Tomdispatch. But what special counsel
Patrick Fitzgerald may still lack to crack open the case for a White House-led
conspiracy to manipulate intelligence, destroy the Wilsons, and get back at the
CIA is a whistleblower like John ("there's a cancer on the
Presidency") Dean or even Jeb Magruder, the top Republican campaign aide
who helped plan the Watergate break-in and cover-up, only to finally cop a
plea. Now that I. Lewis Libby and New York Times reporter Judy Miller, thick as
thieves - "entanglement" was the word that paper's Executive Editor
Bill Keller used - before the vice-presidential chief of staff's indictment,
have been designated the fall folks in Plamegate and the administration's rush
to war in Iraq, the question is: Could resentment for shouldering the blame
alone (so far) lead Libby to disloyal testimony against his higher-ups as
happened in Watergate?

Unlike
in the Watergate years, however, most of the legal action that might just dent
the Bush administration's imperial armor is happening abroad. Just as the most
revelatory reports about American abuses of power and war-making - from the
Italian newspaper La Repubblica's three-part series on the yellowcake forgery
to the recent Italian TV film on the American use of white phosphorus against
civilians in Falluja - have surfaced abroad, so the only real court actions against
American abuses of power are taking place in Europe. There, an Italian court
has indicted CIA agents for "extraordinary rendition" kidnapping
operations on the streets of Milan.
Spanish courts - which sought to try Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet for
torture - are now pursuing American violations of national sovereignty because
CIA planes ferrying detainees to secret "black sites" used airports
in the Azores and the Canary Islands. Both the United Nations and the
European Union are investigating the CIA use of secret European prisons and
airfields in their "rendition" operations. If Congress won't act to
punish Bush Administration officials who enacted a torture policy, perhaps the
Europeans will.

Plamegate,
after all, is no more just an odious but simple case of Beltway character
assassination than the plumbers' break-in at Democratic Party headquarters was
just a burglary. Famed Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein now argues that just
as the Watergate break-in was the key that opened a strongbox of ugly facts
about the Nixon Administration's unbridled abuse of power, so might the Plame
affair break open the Bush Administration's imperial modus operandi.

The
Politics of Impeachment and the One-PartyState

Will
Plamegate lead to the collapse of the Bush presidency or even impeachment?
These are, in the end, matters less of legality than politics, consciousness,
and conscience. A Republican-dominated Congress impeached President Bill
Clinton for lying to a grand jury about sex with a White House intern, while
President Bush remains free even from hearings, let alone legal action, on his
administration's many Watergate-like excesses. Now that's politics!

What
makes the Plame affair so odd, however, is this: Unlike Watergate or the
Iran-Contra revelations, it doesn't really tell us anything we didn't know (or
at least that we couldn't have known) before the Iraq War was launched. The
neoconservatives' long-standing plans to invade Iraq, the administration's
blanket policy of secrecy and the lies it told Congress and the public, the
political manipulation of the intelligence community including the CIA, FBI,
and the military - all rivaling in scope any similar Nixonian schemes- were in
plain sight for those who cared to look during the run-up to the war. Even the
Downing Street memo, the now infamous secret minutes of a meeting of Prime
Minister Tony Blair's senior foreign policy and security officials, describing
the White House's commitment to invade Iraq at a time when it was telling
Americans it had no plans to do so, had little, if anything, new in it. (At
least, its exposure in the British press, like the latest reporting on Plame
affair revelations, helped chip away at what had once been a well-armored
administration.)

In
fact, one of the most revelatory pieces of reporting on the whole pre- and
post-invasion period could be found not in the American press but in an
extraordinary three-part series in the leftist Italian newspaper La Repubblica,
articles which have received only a few skeptical references buried in the back
pages of our major papers (while being headline news in the on-line world of
political websites and blogs). The Italian investigative reporters do tell us
something new - exactly how two of the key administration arguments for war in
Iraq were concocted and known to be bogus by Italian intelligence and
discredited by the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency and State Department
officials until Vice President Cheney pounded CIA Director George Tenet and
Secretary of State Colin Powell into submission.

According
to La Repubblica, the yellowcake story and the forged documents that were its
source were cooked up by a bottom-feeding double agent who needed the money.
(He's Plamegate's most colorful character, rivaling G. Gordon Liddy,
Watergate's handlebar-mustachioed, gun-loving CIA operative.) And Italian
intelligence knew that the infamous aluminum tubes purchased by Saddam
Hussein's regime were for rockets, not centrifuges in a nuclear-weapons
program, because the Italian military had once equipped the Iraqis with that
make of rocket.

High-level
Italian spies are quoted in the piece as being well aware that they needed to
hook up with the rogue Cheney/ Rumsfeld back-channel intelligence operation -
running counter to CIA analysis - in order to keep their hand in with the White
House. (Where is this era's James McCord, the Watergate burglar and CIA
loyalist who told all because he feared the White House sought political
control over the CIA?) Pre-war, the aluminum tubes were also roundly dismissed
as evidence for an Iraqi nuclear weapons program by the UN's nuclear-weapons
inspectors as well as recent Nobel Prize winner Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the
International Atomic Energy Agency. Ex-Ambassador Wilson was only the last in a
long line to discredit Cheney's zealotry about Saddam's nonexistent nuclear
program.

As
for the Bush Administration's insistence that Saddam had chemical and
biological weapons, last week the Los Angeles Times, in a stunning exposť,
documented how German intelligence had repeatedly warned the CIA that an Iraqi
defector dubbed "Curveball," who was the sole source for these
claims, was a con artist who cooked up his story to get a German visa. But the
CIA went right ahead, funneling "Curveball's" phony info into
Secretary of State Colin Powell's UN rush-to-war speech and other presidential
and vice-presidential saber-rattlings.

Even
the weak-kneed Senate Intelligence Committee has revealed how analysts at the
Defense Intelligence Agency and the CIA among others, discredited the
administration's assertions that al-Qaeda operatives were in league with the
Iraqis and gave the infamous Chalabi network of defectors (the main source for
Judy Miller's "scoops") zero marks for credibility.

It's
often forgotten how long it took for Watergate to get traction as a political
juggernaut. The initial Washington Post reports by Woodward and Bernstein on
the Watergate burglary were printed before the 1972 election and yet Nixon was
reelected. (The two reporters had not then traced Liddy, McCord, and the other
Nixon "plumbers" back to the Committee to Reelect the President and
the White House). Three decades later, much more was known about the Bush
administration's excesses before the 2004 election. But times are very
different. The young investigative reporter of Watergate morphed over those
three decades into insider icon Bob Woodward, the "stenographer for the
White House" who managed not to report on, no less mention to his editors,
his all-too-close relationship to the Plame affair, while publicly disparaging
its importance.

In
the early seventies, however skeptical Americans were about Washington after more than eight years of
the war in Vietnam under both Democratic and
Republican war-makers, some hope of political change still smoldered. Cold War
paranoia was ebbing, the horrors of 9/11 yet unimagined. Government was still a
bipartisan concept; corporate money had yet to completely dominate elections;
the media was still diverse, independent of the Republican attack machine, and
skeptical of the powers-that-be. It was still imaginable that classic American
checks and balances might right the ship of state.

Now,
when the President waves the 9/ll voodoo doll, Congress, the media, and the
public flinch. With both houses of Congress under Republican domination and
both parties beholden to corporate America but not voting citizens, there have
been no Watergate-style hearings, no impeachment hearings, no public
investigations at all of Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, torture and secret prisons,
war profiteering, or the lies told in the rush to war. The Supreme Court is
controlled by conservatives unblinkingly willing to put into the presidency a
man whose party may well have stolen elections in Florida and Ohio.

We
have no Sen. Sam Ervin, the avuncular constitutionalist and Chairman of the
Senate Judiciary Committee whose Watergate hearings educated Americans about
the uses and abuses of government; no Rep. Peter Rodino, who ably and calmly
chaired the House impeachment inquiry; not even a Republican like Sen. Howard
Baker, who began by defending the White House and came to understand during the
Watergate hearings that loyalty to country was more important than the survival
of a corrupt president. Congressional critics have no forum like the Watergate
hearings and are dependent on the jaded Beltway media to get the word out. But
in recent weeks, moderate Republicans and John McCain, one of the few
politicians still willing to fight for those quaint, old-fashioned things
called "principles," are gaining traction. And liberal Democrats have
new allies in the antiwar fight, most notably conservative Vietnam veteran Rep. John P. Murtha, who
recently leapt over gutless wonders like John Kerry and Hillary Clinton to demand
the immediate withdrawal of troops from Iraq.

White
House attempts to tar critics with treason have met their match in retired
colonel Murtha who sarcastically said he "liked guys who got five
deferments and [have] never been there and send people to war and then don't
like to hear suggestions about what needs to be done." (During Vietnam, Vice President Cheney received
five deferments and never served in the military.)

We
now have something close to one-party government in this country, an idea still
so fantastic to Americans and their media that the most serious, in depth, and
credible exploration of the 2000 and 2004 election fraud by any journalist -
the book Steal This Vote: Dirty Elections and the Rotten History of Democracy
in America - has been done by an Englishman, Andrew Gumbel of the British
newspaper The Independent. He's now been joined by American professor Mark
Crispin Miller, whose new book Fooled Again: How the Right Stole the 2004
Elections and Why They May Steal the Next One Too (Unless We Stop Them) digs
into the subject as well.

And
instead of the Woodward/Bernstein team, we have Judy Miller (and the reborn Bob
Woodward). Only a tiny handful of reporters at the New York Times, Washington
Post and Los Angeles Times (all with sinking circulations), 60 Minutes and
almost uniquely the New Yorker's Seymour Hersh have been doing the kind of
serious, in-depth investigative journalism that was done by many in the
Watergate era. On-line reporters, able to circulate a single story at
lightening speed around the world, are fueled by the same obsessive zeal as
their age of Watergate print compatriots but have radically less money to
support investigations of any sort. As Carl Bernstein pointed out recently in
Vanity Fair, the Bush administration, like Nixon's, has succeeded only too well
"in making the conduct of the press the issue - again in wartime with
false claims and smears directed at political opponents, reporters, newspapers,
magazines and broadcast organizations for supposedly undermining national
security." If only the media of our era had actually justified such
attacks.

John
Dean was indeed right. The Bush Administration's excesses are "worse than
Watergate," in part because the power that has congealed in presidential
hands is much greater than Nixon's imperial presidency held in the early 1970s.
As a result, its zealotry, secrecy, deceit, and abuses of power are more akin
to the secret bombing of Cambodia or the Iran-Contra affair -
scandals which did not unseat presidents - than Watergate itself. In both the
bombing of Cambodia and Iran-Contragate, a
power-hungry White House kept secret foreign policies that it knew neither
Congress, the courts, nor the public would be likely to approve - even though
Americans have traditionally been only too eager to give the White House a
blank check on national security. No one was indicted for the secret bombing of
Cambodia. In Iran-Contragate, eleven top
administration officials, including two national security advisers and an undersecretary
of state were finally convicted, but the first President George Bush rushed to
pardon four of them as well as Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger (even before
he could be indicted). The specter of this resolution of the Libby case
recently prompted Democrats and then a group of CIA officials - to little media
attention - to write the President demanding that he go on record indicating
there will be no pardons in the Plame affair. They received no reply.

Journalist Judith Coburn has covered war and its aftermath in Indochina, Central America, and the Middle East
for the Village Voice, Pacifica Radio, the Far Eastern Economic Review, Mother
Jones, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, and the San Francisco
Chronicle, among others. She co-anchored (with David Gelber) Pacifica Radio's
live, gavel-to-gavel coverage of the Watergate hearings.